Sheep-Mutilations & Sacrifice

Britain's respected newspaper, the Telegraph, has today reported on the discovery of a number of sheep found hideously mutilated in fields in the English county of Shropshire.

It's clear from reading the article - which can be found at this link - that the attacks are being firmly blamed on extraterrestrial visitors. Indeed, reading the article provokes imagery of the notorious "cattle-mutilations" that have for years been reported across the United States and which have also been blamed on bug-eyed aliens.

So, are extraterrestrial butchers now focusing their sights on the ancient county of Shropshire? Well, they might be; however, I urge a word or two of caution. This is not the first time that mutilated sheep have been found in Shropshire under very weird circumstances.

In my 2007 book, Man-Monkey: In Search of the British Bigfoot, I wrote about one particularly notorious sheep-mutilation event that occurred in this very same county back in 1989. The source of the story was a man named Rob Lea, who I interviewed in the summer of 2000.

Rob told me that as a direct result of a macabre incident that had occurred in 1989 on a Newport, Shropshire-based farm that was owned by his family at the time, he had developed a deep and personal interest in stories of animal mutilation.

It was in the latter part of August 1989, recalled Rob, when his father had arisen early one morning to find five of his sheep slaughtered under highly unusual and shocking circumstances: laid out in a circle, all five had had their throats cut, with several of their major organs piled high in the middle of the circle. Thoughts of devil-worship inevitably flooded through his father’s frantic mind, said Rob.

Unsurprisingly, the family quickly telephoned the local police, who promptly came out with surprising speed and filed a report, and quietly urged the family not to give the incident too much publicity under any circumstances. No answers were ever forthcoming, however, and the eerie event was never repeated.

During the course of the interview, Rob surprised me with a true ace that he had been hiding up his sleeve all of this time. He smiled, reached below the table, and produced a black briefcase which he duly placed on to the table-top. From within the confines of a large, padded envelope, Rob pulled out seven, 6 x 4, 35mm, color-photographs that graphically displayed the scene of utter carnage at his family’s farm more than a decade earlier.

In other words, and if nothing else, that part of the story could at least be firmly validated. But that was only the very beginning of things – as I had strongly suspected it might be as soon as Rob told his unusual tale to me.

Rob continued, and admitted to me that when he first began digging into the animal mutilation mystery he was, for a mercifully short while at least, an adherent of the theory that dastardly extraterrestrials just might be at work. As time progressed, however, Rob found that, in many ways, something far more disturbing than alien visitations was afoot.

By the late 1990s, said Rob, he had quietly and carefully traveled the length and breadth of the British Isles in hot pursuit of the answers to the puzzle, and had inadvertently stumbled upon a sinister group of people based near the city of Bristol – that Rob had grandly dubbed "The Cult of the Moon-Beast" – that, he asserted to me, were using slaughtered farm animals and even pets in ancient rites and archaic rituals.

The purpose of those same rites and rituals, said Rob continuing, was to use the sacrificed unfortunates as a means of conjuring up monstrous entities from some vile netherworld, and that would then be dispatched to commit God-knows-what atrocities on behalf of their masters in the Cult of the Moon-Beast.

The story told to me by Rob was a long and convoluted one, and much of it is way beyond the scope of this blog post and has more to do with Bigfoot in Britain than anything else; however, the story can be found in full in my Man-Monkey book. But, unusual killings of sheep by occultists are common-place in Britain.

In October 2005, for example, farmer Daniel Alford of Sampford Spiney, near Tavistock, Devon , made a shocking discovery on the wilds of Dartmoor: namely, six sheep, horrifically slaughtered, with their eyeballs removed and their necks viciously broken. More sinister is the fact that the corpses of the animals had been deliberately laid out, in the form of what was undoubtedly a Pagan symbol, near a series of ancient standing-stones.

Alford was convinced that this was the dark and horrific work of occultists; primarily because this was not the first occasion upon which he had made such a gruesome find. In January 2005, Alford had stumbled upon five sheep, killed in a similar fashion and spread out in a circle, only half a mile away. Interestingly, on both occasions the animal attacks had occurred at the height of a full moon.

Alford said at the time: “This was a sacrifice – they had their necks broken. Initially, when you think of sacrifices you think sharp knives and slit throats. That wasn’t the case here. If they had killed them and taken them, I would have accepted it more. Just to outright kill them and leave them is just a waste.”

And as Alford perceptively and rightly noted: “You wouldn’t just get kids catching sheep like that. Someone’s got to know what they’re on about.” Alford was not wrong: somebody most definitely did know what they were doing, and the attacks were only destined to continue.

Equally of significance is the fact that, in 2006, yet more unsettling sacrifices of sheep on Dartmoor occurred, again near Tavistock, and specifically on moorland at a location called Pork Hill. Once again, the necks of the animals had been broken, and their eyes had been taken. This time, however, there was another disturbing development: the tongues of the animals had also been removed.

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) Inspector Becky Wadey commented: “These sheep must have been rounded up on the open moor by whoever carried out this barbaric attack. That would have required a number of people and potentially been quite a spectacle. The bodies were found on open, exposed ground very close to the road, so somebody must have seen something, even if they did not realise at the time that it was suspicious.”

The fact that occultists - and in Shropshire, no less - have been engaged in the sacrifice of sheep for years does not rule out the possibility that ET might really have a taste for lamb. But - even though anomalous aerial lights have been seen in the vicinity of some of the killings in Shropshire - we should not forget that undeniable history of attacks of a very down-to-earth, but no less unsavory, nature have carried out by occultists in this very same county.

In my view, there are some genuinely anomalous animal mutilations. But we don't necessarily have to look to outer-space for the answers. The old traditions of witchcraft, the occult and sacrificial rites may have far more to do with such matters than anything that ET could ever conjure-up.